


Valentine's Day

by spaceboy



Category: Archie Sheridan and Gretchen Lowell Series, Beauty Killer Series, Gretchen Lowell Series - Chelsea Cain
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-02-27
Packaged: 2018-01-13 23:09:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1243981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spaceboy/pseuds/spaceboy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Archie Sheridan is a ticking bomb, and it's time for him to go off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Valentine's Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Devka](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Devka).



> Yeah, this was supposed to actually be done for Valentine's Day. It's late, but it's still A THING I FINISHED and I'm super happy about that.

There was no breaking point. No moment when he snapped so abruptly you could hear the twang of the broken string. It happened slowly, little by little, gradually enough that nobody noticed, not even Susan.

It happened because he was afraid. Kissing Susan was a bad idea. Letting her move out of her mom’s place and into his was a worse idea. Susan had no idea. She didn’t get it. She thought everything was going perfectly. She didn’t realize that every step they took in their relationship put her in greater danger. He did, and so every day they were together he felt more guilt, and more fear.

It happened because he was angry. At all of them. At Susan for still being _happy_ , for persisting in thinking it was going to be all right. At Henry and Claire for pulling away, for acting like they had given up on him. At the rest of the department for treating him like it was all his fault. Most of all at himself, because he knew they were right.

It happened because he was in love. Once or twice a week he would wake up to find the bathroom door locked, steam drifting through the cracks and the sound of water splashing on the other side. Susan was in the bath, and she wouldn’t come out while he was there. He started keeping his toothbrush in the drawer of his nightstand so he could brush his teeth in the kitchen and leave her to herself. It didn’t take long to figure out that those were the days when she’d heard him calling the wrong name in his sleep.

It wore him down slowly. The months since Halloween had dragged by. There were no leads on Gretchen. He wasn’t working on the case, but he knew someone would have told him if there was anything. She hadn’t left him a phone number.  He still had the old one memorized, but she wouldn’t use that again. There was silence. Complete silence while he recovered from the latest wound and went back to work, and while he and Susan grew closer. As the silence dragged on, it started to congeal like drying blood until it formed into a plan.

* * *

 

Susan said she thought Valentine’s Day was stupid, but even Archie, who had a pretty terrible track record at reading people, could tell she was lying. When she stepped into the bedroom, lit by dozens of candles  and scattered with roses, she laughed, she rolled her eyes, she scoffed that it was over the top and cliché. Ten seconds later she was kissing him and had somehow already stripped down to lacy red bra and panties.

Her hair was red this month. She had seemed genuinely annoyed at anyone who suggested it was because of the holiday. He had believed her right up until now, when he saw that it was the same dark red shade as the lingerie.

It was the same routine every time, she tried to move her hands over his chest as if there was nothing wrong with it, and he tried to look like he was okay with it because asking her to stop would draw attention to it and neither of them needed that. But he was done pretending. He held her wrists and gently moved her hands away from him, then took a step forward, forcing her to move back against the wall, and pinned the hands above her head.

“Oh, are we finally going to do something interesting?” There was a bite to the sentence.

“Would you like to?”

“ _Yes_ , I’d like to; I’ve been saying so for weeks.”

“I know.” He leaned in and kissed her on the neck. “I’m sorry. I needed  some time to make sure I’d be okay doing it.” He pulled back to watch her face. He hadn’t realized she was this annoyed about it.

“You mean to make sure you’d be okay doing it with someone besides – ”

As soon as she said Gretchen’s name out loud the night would be over and marked down as a disaster. He kissed her hard on the mouth. It worked in movies. It worked now. Her mouth kept moving, forming the name with her lips against his. Then she let it go and kissed him back.

“Sorry,” she said after Archie had finally decided it might be safe to break the kiss. “Never mind. Let’s just have a nice time. With the interesting things.”

“Great.” He smiled, relieved. It should all go all right now. He kissed her again, then let go of her wrists and twisted a hand into her hair. She yelped and instinctively swung out a hand at him, hitting him uselessly on the shoulder as he dragged her over to the bed and threw her down on it. A spike of fear shot through him as it occurred to him that maybe jumping right into that hadn’t been the best way to start, but she looked up at him from the bed, bra askew and strands of hair stuck across her face, and laughed, genuinely entertained by this. He straddled her and pushed her hands up to the headboard. He held them there with one hand while he leaned over to pull open the drawer of the nightstand with the other, and fumble for the handcuffs. It took entirely too long. There were more things in there than usual, things he had gathered up for tonight, and he couldn’t lean over quite far enough to see what he was doing. Susan kept laughing as he sifted through the drawer’s contents, and wiggled, pulling jokingly against his sloppy hold on her wrists but not quite enough to get out of it.

“Performance issues?”

He found the cuffs finally and snapped them on her and around a bar of the headboard. “Nope.”

He kissed down her neck, harder and harder till he added teeth, just a little at first, then firm bites against the base of her neck. She didn’t react. He glanced up. Her eyes were closed, her brow furrowed, like she was trying to work out a puzzle. He bit down harder, much harder, without warning, and she yelped and tried to pull her hands out of his hold, but he held on.

“Less?”

“Still trying to decide,” she said, sounding a little out of breath. She relaxed again and he kissed over the spot. She flinched, then laughed at her own reaction. He ran his tongue up her throat and she leaned her head back and shivered. Interesting. He stroked her neck, then wrapped his hands gently around it and pressed down, just a little, just so she would feel it, not so it would actually impede her breathing. She stopped laughing, but she was still smiling, and watching him. He pressed a touch harder.

“Oh . . .” her eyes closed and her back arched, pressing her breasts up toward him. 

“Like that?”

“Mm hm.” She moved her hips under him, pressing against the bed and then up against him. He tried to adjust so that he could press on her throat with one hand and free up the other, but he let up on the pressure as he moved. Her eyes opened and she rolled her neck to put it more comfortably on the pillow, and as she did so she caught sight of something on the bedside table.

“Chocolate?”

“What?” He followed her bright look to a heart-shaped box on the table. “Oh. Yeah.” He had figured out his position now and was sliding his free hand under her bra, but he had lost her to chocolate.

“Can I have one?”

“Now?”

She fluttered her eyelids at him. “Please, sir, could I have one?” She was already laughing by the time she finished the question. He laughed with her. She was still feeling awkward about this and laughing made it easier, let her enjoy it but at the same time half-pretend that it was all a joke.

“I suppose you may.” He took a piece from the box and held it just above her lips. She opened her mouth wide and stuck out her tongue.

 _He’s in the basement, opening his mouth wide with his tongue out for the pills, being a good boy so she won’t jam the funnel down his throat this time, and flies are buzzing around the corpse on the floor_.

“Archie?”

He was balanced on one arm, the elbow locked and shaking so hard he’s about to fall down on top of her, the other hand squeezing into a fist around the broken and melting chocolate. As soon as his eyes focused on her he knew what he wanted to do. But he couldn’t, not yet.

He sat back on his knees to take the weight of his shaking arm, and squeezed his eyes shut so he wouldn’t have to look at her while he breathed deeply to keep himself in check. _You can wait, darling._ The shaking stopped and the panicked impulse faded as her voice came into his head. He opened his eyes again. Susan was scared, scared for _him_. He let out a breath and smiled. “I’m all right. Sorry.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.” He returned the smushed chocolate to the box and took a prettier one. He leaned back down over her. “Don’t you want your chocolate?”

She nodded and opened her mouth again, and he was all right this time. She still looked hesitant, but he put the chocolate in her mouth and she closed her lips around his fingers and licked at them before he pulled them slowly away, and by then she looked happy again and her eyes fluttered closed like eating the chocolate was the most blissful thing in the world. She swallowed and ran her tongue over her lips. “Thank you, sir. I’m sorry I interrupted what you were doing.”

“That’s all right. I’m sure you can make it up to me.” He put his hand against her throat again, and watched her relax and start to press up against him the moment he touched her there. He moved the other hand over her, finally slipping under her panties as he tightened the hold on her throat, for the first time to a point where it actually impeded her breathing. He teased at her and bit at her shoulders and finally let her throat go long enough to get his own pants off and slide into her.

His hand was back at her throat and he was thrusting into her and she was choking for air and pulling at the handcuffs, not to try to get out of them but because her whole body needed _something_ to do to respond to the rush of sensation. He was fumbling in the drawer again for something, but she wasn’t paying attention to that, there were more important things to pay attention to, and just as she slipped over the edge he thrust the knife into her side.

She screamed, but nothing came out but a strangled cough through the pressure on her throat. She was still twitching with the cooling orgasm. He released the pressure and the scream had a voice now, one of anger more than pain. It cut off in a cough as she pulled air back into her. As Archie waited for her to be able to speak, he pulled out of her and watched the red spilling out around the handle of the pocket knife sticking out from just below her ribs.

“ _What the fuck was that?_ ” she screamed at him a few wheezing breaths later.

“Well, I’m not really good at anatomy. But Gretchen stabbed me somewhere around there and I’m okay, so I think you should be all right.”

“ _You stabbed me?_ ”

He pulled the knife out in one jerk. She screamed again. He held it up where she could see it clearly. Blood dripped off of it into her eyes. She flinched and blinked over and over and rolled her head over so she could rub the blood off onto her shoulder. She was shaking and breathing too fast. “ _What the Hell, Archie?_ ”

“I thought you said you wanted to do something interesting,” he said innocently.

“Okay.” He watched her struggle through the pain and anger to find some rationale, some way to be reasonable about this. “Maybe I should have explained earlier that _normal_ people don’t think ‘something interesting’ means _getting stabbed_.”

“Or if that’s not what you wanted, maybe you should have stuck to playing with normal people.” He dug into the drawer again, not looking at her. The pills were easier to find than the other things had been. He knew what they should feel like in his hand. They were connected to him already. He popped a few in his mouth and swallowed them. He was already high enough, but he wanted Susan to know it, and for someone who made her living by observing things, she was pretty shit at observations sometimes.

“Put that down!” she snapped at him, but he had already taken the pills.

“Okay,” he said, and set the bottle down next to the chocolate box.

“How – _fuck_ ,” she interrupted herself, flinching again at the pain from the stab wound. “How long have you been on that shit?”

“Since Halloween,” he said, and looked back at her to watch her face as that sank in.

“You have been high,” she said, the words coming out overly precise in her anger, “for our – entire – fucking – relationship.”

“Pretty much,” he said, although it hadn’t really been a question. “It made it a lot easier to put up with you.”

She screamed words at him, at least he thought they were supposed to be words, but they came out incoherently and with a lot of spitting. She twisted and pulled at the handcuffs and struggled to get out from under him. He settled more firmly on top of her and leaned down over her, hands pressing her shoulders back against the bed. “Get off of me!” she shouted, a few clear words finally getting through. “Get these things off of me!”

He stayed quiet, looking her over, the bra askew and panties gone, blood seeping from below her ribs, neck red and purple from bite marks, a thin sheen of sweat from exertion. Her face was contorted with anger, but that was all. Anger that he had been taking pills and hiding it from her and that he was fucked up enough to think she wanted to get stabbed. She had no idea what was going on. He had _stabbed_ her and she still didn’t understand. No wonder she couldn’t keep a steady reporting job.

 The crumpled, broken chocolate was still sitting on its crinkled brown paper wrapper. Her demands to be let go turned into a mangled yell as he forced her jaw open; then the yell cut off into a convulsing gag as he forced the chocolate down her throat.

“Swallow it. You probably won’t asphyxiate if you can get it down.” She wouldn’t listen, just glared at him and kept trying to cough it up, never mind that he had half his hand jammed in her mouth to keep it down. But the coughing wasn’t working and she was scared, finally, finally he could see something in her besides anger. She swallowed, choked again when it didn’t work, and finally got it down.

“Good girl.” He got his hand safely out of the way of her teeth before he let go of her. She didn’t do anything though. She lay still and didn’t even try to talk while she got her breath back. She coughed, gagged, convulsed like she might throw up, but then settled back quiet against the pillow. “Are we on the same page now?”

“The page where you’re fucking insane? Yeah, I think we’re on it. Now what?”

He picked up the knife againand she started to struggle, grabbing onto the bars of the headboard to help try to pull herself out from under him. He put an arm across her throat and leaned down on it. Real pressure this time, not what they’d been playing at before. Her mouth gaped like a fish without getting any air in. Instead of more useless gasping, though, she switched to mouthing “Fuck you” at him over and over.

“Very original. Do you wanna be good and hold still for me or do you want me to try to cut you up from here? It’ll be a lot harder this way so I might make a mistake and then you might be dead and that would be sad. But I can try.” He held the knife awkwardly between them and pressed it against her collarbone. She shook her head violently. “No? You’ll hold still?” She pursed her lips and nodded. He took the arm away, sat up and started to cut while she tried to get her breath back. She wasn’t fighting, but the irregular heaving of her chest as she gasped for air didn’t make it easy.

Once she was breathing normally she craned her neck to see what he was doing. Blood was smeared across her chest from her shoulders down across her breasts, so it took a minute for her to see where the actual cut was. As soon as she did, she was screaming again. “ _NO! No, you are not fucking doing that!_ ” She wrenched her body to one side and the knife nicked deeper than he wanted it to. She screamed, and then she was screaming for help. He sighed, grabbed her hair and yanked her back into place before settling down with his arm across her throat again. Her mouth kept screaming but the sound was gone. She looked much nicer that way.

“Do you have any idea how thick the walls are here? And nobody else even lives on this floor. The closest neighbor is downstairs and on the other side of the building. And I think he’s deaf. So please just shut up.” It was all true, but it had never quite sunk in until he said it aloud. Now he had to wonder if this had been somewhere in him all along. If he had chosen the building knowing subconsciously that he would need the soundproof isolation. It didn’t matter now, though. What mattered was finishing this. And she wasn’t listening to reason. She kept trying breathlessly to scream and pointlessly to struggle, so he stayed where he was, leaning down on her throat, as he cut the other side of the figure as well as he could. By the time he took his arm away and sat back to look at it, she wasn’t trying to fight or scream anymore, just spending the little energy she had left fighting to get in a breath. When the pressure was suddenly gone the air came in too fast and she choked on it.

He rubbed a hand across the piece, trying to clear the blood enough to see the design. It was awful. The right side looked okay, starting in the center of her breastbone and curving up toward her shoulder, then down the the point between her breasts. There, of course, it cut off in the wrong direction, a random stray deep jab of a line from when she had realized what was going on. The left side was all done half-lying down and only half able to see what he was doing, so it came out jagged and lopsided, a pathetic excuse for a heart. But that was kind of appropriate, he supposed. And you could tell what it was, and that was all that mattered.

Susan got her breath back and she was screaming again. He wished she would stop that. It was giving him a headache.

“ _I don’t care how fucked up you are, how could you fucking do_ that?”

“But we match now, don’t you think it’s sweet?”

“ _Are you doing this for_ her? _Are you trying to_ impress _her? You said you were over her. I should have fucking known though when you came to rescue me and you fucked her instead._ ”

“What? At the party?”

“ _Yes at the fucking party._ ”

“I was _unconscious_.”

“ _So what? You would have done it anyway. You’re obsessed. Get the fuck off of me and go crawl back to her. If_ you’re _that fucked in the head, fine, but why the fuck did you go and make it_ my _problem?_ ”

“ _You_ made it your problem. _You_ came after _me_ because you can’t get it up for anybody who’s _not_ fucked up. I told you she would hurt you, _everyone_ told you she would hurt you, and you never listened.”

“Yeah, but she _didn’t_ hurt me, did she? _You_ did. That’s _different_ , Archie Fucking Sheridan.”

“Do people ever tell you you talk too much? Or can they not get a word in to tell you? Cause _everybody_ thinks it, just so you know.”

“Yeah, well that’s not really something I’m gonna apologize to _you_ for right now. If you’re gonna do this shit to me you’re at least gonna have to _listen_ to me while you do it.”

“Actually, I’m really _not_ gonna have to do that.” He pulled her jaw open again and clamped her tongue between his fingers, digging the nails in to keep a hold on the slippery thing. She tried to bite down on his hand but only managed to bite down on her tongue as he stretched it out of her mouth. He put the knife against it, as far back as he could, mostly stuffed into her mouth so the point of it pressed against her cheek, and cut. It was harder than he thought it should have been, the thing wouldn’t stay still and Susan was squirming and thrusting to try to throw him off of her and this time she almost succeeded. He fell forward on her and his hand slipped but it slipped in the right direction this time. He pushed himself up on his elbows, resting them on her shoulders to help hold her down. He had the knife in one hand, severed tongue in the other, seeping blood down his arm. She was screaming, the sound coming out bubbling through the blood filling her mouth. She turned her head to the side and tried to spit it out so it wouldn’t drip back down her throat and choke her, but it kept coming and she kept coughing and spitting and screaming while Archie stared in turn at her and the piece of loose muscle in his hand.

There hadn’t been a breaking point, but here was a turning point. He couldn’t cover this up or gloss this over, and he couldn’t deny it was what he had just done, and what he had _wanted_ to do. Through the high of the pills the whole night had been almost dreamlike, but this was real. He waited for horror to set in, or regret or self-loathing or _something_ , but it didn’t happen. He dropped the tongue into the chocolate box and slammed the knife deep into her stomach. He dragged it through her for a short, deep cut, then pulled it out and did it again just below the first one, and again and again. He watched her face, contorted with pain and garbled screams and choking away the blood that filled her mouth and ran down her chin, thinning out as it mingled with tears pouring out from her eyes. He felt himself relax as he did it, settling into the same instant instinctive calm that came on him when Gretchen touched him. It was the same feeling, that this was right, this was where he was supposed to be.

_Visiting her in prison, late at night, alone together for the first time since the basement, he asks how many time bombs she’s left out there, like Reston ticking toward murder._

_“Including you?” she answers._

Gradually, the screaming faded into whimpers, the jerking struggles shrank to involuntary twitches. She didn’t have the strength to cough out the blood anymore, and he figured it was that that did it, blocking her air till there wasn’t anymore. He dropped the knife on her stomach and watched her go still. Shaking, he rolled off of her and half-fell off the bed. He settled himself, sitting on the floor with his back against the bed, an occasional drip making its way across the sheet to fall into his hair. He watched the bedroom door. It was closed. It didn’t move. He kept watching it.

* * *

 

He knew, despite the silence all these months, that she had been watching him. Maybe she was here, in town, maybe she followed him sometimes, and sometimes he caught sight on the street of a flash of hair or face or hand that reminded him of her. More likely she was far away, but watching all the same, keeping tabs on his cases that made it to the newspaper, getting copies of the press releases that didn’t, maybe hacking the department to see what he was up to. He didn’t know computers, he didn’t know if she could do that. But she was watching, one way or another, and so he had been dropping keywords, all this time, from before he had consciously known why. “We’ll catch them by Valentine’s Day,” he had promised on TV. The case wasn’t relevant, some series of armed burglaries, but she would see it. “I have a ridiculous number of personal days saved up,” he told a news blogger he agreed to talk to as a favor to Susan. “If nothing else I’m taking Valentine’s Day off.” She always knew where to find him, and now she knew when.

She kept him waiting, though. He dozed off, snapped awake in a panic till he remembered what was happening, then dozed off again. The next time he woke up it was to the sound of the bedroom door snapping shut.

Her shoulders were pressed back against the door, one hand lingering on the knob. She was dressed casually in jeans and a special pink-and-red Valentine’s Day edition of the “RUN GRETCHEN” shirt that they sold all over town every time she was on the run, hair loose around her shoulders. Her eyes traveled slowly over the room, the petals and scattered clothes on the floor, up to the bed and over Susan’s body, the knife resting in the blood on her stomach, the smear across her chest over the heart, the dark pool of her mouth hanging open. Archie stayed sitting and watched her, feeling the calm settle over him again, till she finally looked down at him and smiled. She pressed a hand over her heart. “For me?”

“Yeah.” He pulled himself slowly to his feet, stiff from sitting in one place for hours. He needed to say something else, but his head was fuzzy from dozing off and from too many pills. So he just watched her as she moved across the floor to stand at the foot of the bed. She let a hand trail over Susan’s bare leg as she moved up the bed, closer to Archie, looking more carefully now at the body. She pressed her fingers against each stab wound, then traced them lovingly over the heart. She stroked Susan’s cheek and then put two fingers in her mouth to press it wider open so she could see what all that blood had come from.

“Oh, that’s adorable. What did you do with it?”

He reached a shaking hand over to the nightstand and picked up the heart-shaped box, contents smeared with blood from the tongue that rested in the middle of it. “Chocolate?”

She laughed, and he laughed too in ecstatic shock because she looked so surprised and so pleased and it was because of _him_. She took a piece from right next to the tongue, considered it, observing the blood smeared along one side, shrugged and bit into it anyway. She looked back at Susan. “I wish you had let me watch, though.”

His smile dropped and he shuddered as he put the box back down. He hadn’t done it all right? “I’m sorry – I wanted it to be a surprise – and – and I taped it – I think. If I did it right.” He pointed across the room, where his laptop was set up, mostly hidden behind roses in a glass he had used for a makeshift vase. Gretchen moved away to look at the computer, and he followed, keeping the distance between them the same, afraid to let her move away in case she was suddenly gone. “Did it work?”

“It did.” She stopped the recording and saved it to the computer and to a flash drive. People just had those around now. Archie didn’t understand. But he was glad, because if she had asked him for one he didn’t know where he would have found it. He did have one, though. Maybe.

The thing was saved and the flash drive was pocketed, but she was still playing with the computer and didn’t know why until she stepped away from the computer and he saw the video filling the screen, started back at the beginning, a few minutes of footage of the still empty room before they came in. It was eerie to look at the past room, decorated and clean and innocent, while they stood in the same room, now a bloody crime scene. “I put it on a loop,” she said. “Don’t you think it will be nice for the police to see when they come in?” She turned to face him and looked over his head at the scene one more time before taking his hands in hers. He shivered as their fingers intertwined. He never got used to it; every time she touched him his stomach turned to butterflies and his head rushed like pills kicking in. “Thank you, darling. It’s beautiful.”

He exhaled and smiled in relief, huge relief that he hadn’t done it wrong after all, she _liked_ it. “I wanted –” he said, remembering the thing he was supposed to say earlier, but he couldn’t get it out. A lump rose in his throat and he had to cut off the sentence so he wouldn’t start crying. She pulled him close to her, pressing his head into her shoulder and stroking his hair.

“It’s all right, darling. What did you want?”

He was acutely aware that he was still mostly naked and covered in blood, and he was probably messing up her clothes as she held him. But she didn’t seem to mind, so it didn’t matter. He clung to her, the only thing still connecting him to the world. “I wanted you to know – that you’re the only one. I love you. I need you. I belong to you. And I’m tired of pretending I don’t.”

She stopped smoothing his hair and tightened her fingers in it instead, holding him tight and possessive by it, holding him closer, and he relaxed against her. As long as she was holding on to him, he was all right. With the other hand she traced over and over the scar on his chest, her mark. “You don’t have to pretend, darling,” she whispered, breath fluttering against his ear. “Not anymore.” 


End file.
